Skill Acquisition and the LISP Tutor

TLDR

The LISP tutor monitors learning of 500 productions and employs remediation, feedback content, and timing to give students more practice and explain why correct solutions work. Students learn LISP productions following a power‑law curve, transfer occurs from similar programming experience, and individual differences lie mainly in acquisition and retention rates, showing that LISP learning is simple despite its complexity.

Abstract

An analysis of student learning with the LISP tutor indicates that while LISP is complex, learning it is simple. The key to factoring out the complexity of LISP is to monitor the learning of the 500 productions in the LISP tutor which describe the programming skill. The learning of these productions follows the power‐law learning curve typical of skill acquisition. There is transfer from other programming experience to the extent that this programming experience involves the same productions. Subjects appear to differ only on the general dimensions of how well they acquire the productions and how well they retain the productions. Instructional manipulations such as remediation, content of feedback, and timing of feedback are effective to the extent they give students more practice programming, and explain to students why correct solutions work.